Amazon Is in A Pickle
There’s a reason why AWS senior management is mandating that code be reviewed before it is shipped.
The reason is because much of AWS’s code is written by Amazon’s proprietary agentic platform - Kiro. Not claude code. Not codex. Kiro. Not exactly the market leader. I do not know anyone that uses Kiro.
Amazon cut a large number of software dev engineer I, software dev engineer II and software dev engineer III roles at year-end and in the on-going cuts, and the agentic platform the remaining devs are being forced to use is not up to par. Sounds like a recipe for poor execution on the product development front at AWS and Amazon more broadly.
What did Amazon expect? There has to be an enormous knowledge gap at the company on the engineering side, to say nothing of the fact that senior engineers are now going to be spending much of their time reviewing code.
Amazon is shaping up to be a mess. Headcount may be leaned out, but Amazon’s software products and services will suffer performance issues for years to come.
Andy Jassy will eventually be shown the door.